Kendall Scott explains the Unified Process of software development, including a breakdown of the four phases within the Unified Process and the five activities, or workflows, that project workers perform.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Introduction

The Unified Process fits the general definition of a process: a set of
activities that a team performs to transform a set of customer requirements into
a software system. However, the Unified Process is also a generic process
framework that people can customize by adding and removing activities based on
the particular needs and available resources for a project.

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is an example of a specialized version of
the Unified Process that adds elements to the generic framework; see Appendix A
for a discussion of those elements. The discussion in the body of this book
about The Internet Bookstore, an example project, represents a tailoring in the
other direction: The team doing that project skipped some activities that
didn't add value. This example system illustrates a key aspect of how one
should put the Unified Process to work: Use those elements of it that add value
for a particular project; omit those elements that don't add value. See
Appendix C for an example of a streamlined process based on the principle of
starting with core elements and adding other elements as necessary.

The Unified Process makes extensive use of the Unified Modeling Language
(UML). At the core of the UML is the model, which in the context of a
software development process is a simplification of reality that helps the
project team understand certain aspects of the complexity inherent in
software.

The UML was designed to help the participants in software development
efforts build models that enable the team to visualize the system, specify the
structure and behavior of that system, construct the system, and document the
decisions made along the way. Many of the tasks that the Unified Process defines
involve using the UML and one or more models.

NOTE

See Chapter 1 of UML Explained for information about models and their
value in software development.

The remaining sections in this chapter describe how the Unified Process
evolved, the key tenets that underlie the process (use case driven,
architecture-centric, and iterative and incremental), and the vocabulary used to
describe the details of the process.